March 26, 2000

By MICHAEL HIRSCHORN

THE OPERATOR
David Geffen Builds, Buys,
and Sells the New Hollywood. By Tom King.
Illustrated. 670 pp. New York:
Random House. $25.95.

ixteen years ago, David Geffen was presiding over a fledgling, money-losing record company that was a minor and not particularly distinguished satrapy at the margins of Steve Ross's Warner Communications empire. Geffen's audacious goal was to hornswoggle Warner, which owned half of Geffen Records, to give up its 50 percent stake as a reward for Geffen's agreeing to a five-year contract extension with the parent company.

The chief of Warner Brothers Records, Mo Ostin, was unlikely to accede to such a request, but Geffen sensed that Ross -- who had a soft spot for Geffen -- might be pliable. What Geffen did next, Tom King reports in this exhaustive and often finger-wagging biography of the entertainment mogul, was ''preposterous, duplicitous and downright awful.''

Geffen believed that if he could pick a fight with Ostin -- a longtime mentor -- he could use the dust-up as an excuse to refuse to negotiate with him, allowing unimpeded access to the big man himself. After several aborted attempts at antagonizing Ostin, King writes, Geffen hatched a plan to alienate him through his wife. Over lunch at the Ivy, Geffen told Evelyn Ostin, ''You know, Mo really doesn't care about you that much,'' and began making provocative comments about her health and children. Mrs. Ostin walked out, and the couple would not talk to Geffen for the next year and a half.

The path cleared to Ross, Geffen got the deal he wanted. Geffen Records soon embarked on a remarkable run that, five years later, would allow Geffen to put his now wholly owned company on the market for top dollar. Ross, given his rather extraordinary patronage of Geffen, figured the company was his by droit du seigneur. Geffen did little to dispel that impression. ''At the end of the day,'' Geffen told Ross's deputies, ''it's not just about money.''

Actually, it was about the equity. Geffen ultimately spurned the cash-strapped Ross, who had recently gobbled up Time Inc. Instead, he took an offer of more than $500 million in stock from MCA -- and his good fortune was only beginning. The Japanese conglomerate Matsushita made its own over-the-top bid for MCA, buying the American company for some $6.59 billion. This felicitous sequence of deals left Geffen with $660 million in cash, making him, as King writes, the single biggest beneficiary of ''a Japanese acquisition of a U.S. company in history.''

At this point in King's biography, we're meant to see Geffen as a latter-day Sammy Glick, but Geffen is not so easily pigeonholed. As King's reporting makes clear again and again, Geffen possessed that perfect combination of attributes -- seemingly genuine empathy and ruthless cunning, progressive sensibility crossed with market-moving vulgarity -- that makes him the prototype for a whole generation of multiplexed, multinational moguls-in-waiting.

Along the way, Geffen brushed against nearly every significant music and pop-culture phenomenon of the last 40 years, helping create the California sound in the late 60's and 70's through his patronage of Crosby, Stills and Nash (and later Young), Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne, Linda Ronstadt and the biggest of them all, the Eagles. He produced ''Risky Business,'' the echt early-80's movie that starred Tom Cruise in his first major role, and was instrumental in bringing ''Dreamgirls'' and ''Cats'' to Broadway. He can be seen in photographs leaving the hospital with Yoko Ono after John Lennon's death. In the late 80's and early 90's, Geffen Records signed Guns 'n' Roses and Nirvana, arguably the last two American rock bands of any mass-cultural import. Geffen had sex with, and almost married, Cher when that was cool; came out of the closet when that was cool; found his way to est, Lifespring and Marianne Williamson when those were cool (in California, at least); and dispensed money for nose jobs to his friends the way the rest of us bring a $16 bottle of Sancerre to dinner parties.

Beginning in the 1960's, Geffen cultivated, fell out with, then made up with virtually all the major players in the entertainment business. He had significant dealings with, among many others, Michael Eisner, Barry Diller, Michael Ovitz, Sandy Gallin, Irving Azoff, Clive Davis, Ahmet Ertegun, Lew Wasserman and, more recently, Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg, his partners in DreamWorks SKG. Indeed, the impression left by King's book is one of a klatch of grumpy, petty young (and then middle-aged, and then older) men squabbling among themselves over bruised egos and disputes too obscure for an outsider to discern.

In one hilarious incident recounted in ''The Operator,'' Diller attempts to heal a singularly bitter feud between Geffen and Mike Ovitz, then in the middle of his disastrously brief tenure as Disney's No. 2. Geffen had gone on record calling Ovitz worse than the Antichrist. ''If I had that problem with somebody, and I wanted them to stop,'' Diller reportedly advised Ovitz, more or less in jest, ''I would say, 'Well, if you do it ever again I'm going to beat you up!' ''Ovitz apparently took Diller's advice literally, warning Geffen, ''David, if you keep saying bad things about me, I am going to beat you up!'' Geffen screamed, ''If you so much as touch me I'll have you arrested!''

In spite of these episodes -- or perhaps because of them -- Geffen alone emerged from the music business both a billionaire and master of his own fate.

'THE OPERATOR' IN THE NEWS

. . . Terry Press, the executive in charge of publicity and marketing at DreamWorks, said some details of the book were factually untrue. "David feels the book impugns his integrity to a level that's not true," Ms. Press said. "The book does not have, on balance, the way that David has played out his life. David is truthful about his life, warts and all. And he wished to have that reflected in the book. He was also hoping the book would be an inspiration to young gay people."

Mr. King himself said he believed that he was selected by Mr. Geffen to write the biography -- and numerous writers have sought out Mr. Geffen to write such a book -- for two reasons. "I work for a respectable organization like The Wall Street Journal and I'm gay," Mr. King said. "It's no secret that David has a rather colorful personal story. I think he thought having a biographer who was gay might lead to a more empathetic portrayal" . . .

''The Operator'' began in 1996 with Geffen's cooperation, but halfway through, he withdrew his support and has recently been savaging King and the book (though one half suspects he's not as upset as he's letting on). In any event, the years of grappling with him appear to have left King immune to his subject's particular charms. He reconstructs a trail of lies, petty fibs and tactical elisions beginning in Geffen's high school years (Geffen allegedly finked out his co-chairman of the senior year musical revue) and running through his entry into the management business at the William Morris Agency. Geffen, we are told, fabricated evidence of a U.C.L.A. degree, claimed he was related to the producer Phil Spector and made up a story about his mother's having breast cancer after he was caught pilfering mail from the William Morris mailroom. King sees the young Geffen as a ''con artist'' with a nearly limitless ''lust for cash.'' He is similarly prosecutorial in recounting Geffen's dealings as a budding mogul. ''His principal desire had nothing to do with noble ambitions to find, nurture and protect the careers of deserving artists,'' he writes primly. ''His hunger appeared to be insatiable. David Geffen wanted more than anything to get rich.''

King is strong on anecdote and incident, weak on analysis and insight. His book is somewhat typical of journalism about the history of the music business, which tends to blame sharks like Geffen for rock 'n' roll's fall from movement to mere business, as though there was once a halcyon time when musicians were immune from money-lust and record companies only cared about the music, man. This, of course, is bunk. The rock business was built in the 50's in part by mobsters who exploited young performers ruthlessly and thought nothing of resorting to extortion, flimflammery and worse to squeeze an extra buck out of the talent.

If anything, Geffen came of age during a rare period when singer-songwriters were able to dictate the terms of record deals while preserving more or less complete creative control. Geffen's contribution as a manager was to find fresh ways of unlocking value for his artists (and, of course, himself); as a mogul, he brought unflagging ingenuity to the marketing of acts that today would almost certainly die on the vine. Like his forerunner Albert Grossman, who managed Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin and the Band, Geffen understood how stardom could be leveraged into power and financial gain.

Thanks in part to Geffen's sudden refusal to cooperate with the author, the account of his years at DreamWorks is notably thin. Though the company has had many successes, its record division, headed by Mo Ostin (it is a small world!), has failed to comprehend a market dominated by hip-hop and teen pop. Its artists have tended toward an earnest 70's singer-songwriter vibe, which is 180 degrees out of sync with today's hyper-packaged, slick pop style. Likewise, DreamWorks' efforts at tackling the Internet have been, to date, haphazard. Geffen, as the book's subtitle suggests, certainly played a crucial role in building ''the New Hollywood.'' Whether he'll play much of a part in creating the New New Hollywood is another question entirely.

Michael Hirschorn, the former editor of Spin magazine, is editor in chief of Inside.com, a new venture covering the entertainment and media businesses.